Bibliovortex

Still leaves us with something that is probably EEY, assuming 2 is a vowel and that the 2-5 therefore has to be 25.

Okay, after looking at Wikipedia's frequency chart, it looks like we have a pretty normal distribution of letters after all. The lower half of the chart is relatively distorted, but I'd expect that with pretty much any sample that's under 10,000 words or so, and not all the charts agree on the frequencies for English in general anyway. All the most common letters are within a couple places of each other in the rankings, though. If 25 is a letter. You may be right about 2, especially since it's the second most common number and vowels are more common than consonants. I think that if we have any 25's they have to be consonants - there's a 2-5-1-2-1-2 sequence, and I'm almost positive the 1-2-1-2 is 12-12, which would make it EE. There's also a 2-5-1-2 a bit later, which means that two of the four possible 25's are probably right before an E. You can't have any vowel before a double E, and IE and UE are not terribly common. AE and OE are almost nonexistent in American English. Edit: Of course, we could have a word break, which would neutralize my objection in the second case. Words starting with EE are rare, though, so if I have that right it probably is in the middle of a word. Edit: Yeah, I should look more carefully. It's 1-2-1-2-2-5; the problem is still there, but it would be a vowel after the double E. *headdesk*

Haha, yeah...I noticed yours right after I posted. I haven't gone through and compared all of the frequencies to the overall distribution for English, but O stands out to me as being unusually frequent - normally E, I and T are the most common. Also, I'd like to venture a guess that whatever number of letters we are working with, 5 is almost certainly a consonant. If the 10-11-12 is "the," we have a double 5 right after a (possible) E, which means it can't be O; AA, II and UU are all so rare in English that we can safely discard them. (If that's a 1-2 and not a 12, 5 could be O, but I tend to think not.)

Aminar, I'm still not entirely sure I understand your explanation. I think I understand generally what you're talking about, but I have no clue how it applies to the issue. I'm good at languages, but math is...not really terribly intuitive for me. As far as the 27-28-29 issue goes, I see two possible 17's, one possible 18 and one possible 19. Not a lot, although again, this is a small sample size. If we ignore the 10-11-12 theory, there are two possible 27's and one possible 29. If we assume that 10-11-12 is a word, there is still one possible 27 (it could be interpreted as 1-2-7, 12-7, or 1-27). I'm not really sure we have enough data to draw a firm conclusion, although I will admit that the idea of a substitution with more than 27 letters is...highly implausible to say the least. I don't think the location of the writing within the room has any particular significance to the meaning of the cipher...given the way the locations are described, it really sounds to me like Taravangian just wrote on every possible available writing surface, including the entire room and most of its furnishings. The two "ceiling rotation" epigraphs could possibly be connected, I suppose. The only other two connected Diagram epigraphs are the ones where you read the alternating letters of the paragraph and get two different messages, and the link there is much more obvious. If anyone is curious, I went ahead and found a website that counts letters. Here are the frequency statistics for all of the other Taravangian epigraphs, except for the one that is comprised entirely of dates. (I excluded the attribution at the bottom of each quote, obviously.) Edit: Actually, you should probably use the other one. I forgot about taking out the Q/A's... A 142 B 36 C 56 D 51 E 263 F 48 G 27 H 125 I 158 J 1 K 22 L 77 M 51 N 138 O 182 P 48 Q 3 R 115 S 150 T 211 U 67 V 22 W 48 X 2 Y 37 Z 1

Yes, it's a small sample size, no contest there. I still think there should be WAY more 2's if it's a 26-letter substitution, though. There's no way letters 20-26 of the alphabet just so happen to be all the least common letters - that would be absurd, but it's the only explanation I can think of for why we have 64 1's and only 18 2's. That much at least is so dramatic of an outlier that I don't think we can ascribe it to the sample size. I suggested 16 partly because of the distribution, but partly also because having so many 1's means we have to have a lot of numbers that are in the teens in order to account for all of them if this is any sort of substitution cipher. 10 letters doesn't begin to account for it; if the 10-11-12 pattern is valid, we must have at least 12 letters, and 17, 18 and 19 aren't really terribly significant for the Cosmere. That said, I will freely admit that my argument is not really based on cryptography but more on a generalized sense of logic and pattern recognition. I don't have the background in math to do any sort of serious cryptoanalysis, so I'm more just trying to poke at this for fun and see what I can come up with. I have no idea what necessary pairs are, though I'd be happy to learn.

I don't think this code is based on a 26-letter alphabet substitution, and here's why - the distribution is all wrong. There are 8 numbers that would have a 2 in them, and 11 that would have a 1; even accounting for letter frequency, there still shouldn't be such a massive difference between the number of 1's and the number of 2's (almost fourfold). My first thought was that it might be based on 10, since that number is so important to Roshar, but that leaves far too many 1's even if you exclude the ones that are really 10's. When I looked at Aminar's distribution chart again, though, I noticed that the digits 0-6 occur much more frequently than the digits 7-9. If you leave out the 1's, 0 and 2-6 occur an average of 11 times each. 7-9 occur an average of 4.33 times each. This, combined with the very high number of 1's, implies to me that our substitution has 16 letters instead of 10. It explains why there are so few 2's compared to 1's (and so many 1's in general), and why there are so few 7's, 8's and 9's. I think it's at least plausible to go on the assumption that Taravangian had, on this day, some level of cosmere awareness. (See the epigraph to chapter 85 - sounds to me like he's talking about a Worldhopper.) So it isn't unthinkable that he might come up with a code based on the number 16. The only question is, what 16 letters are being used in the substitution? I don't have the math or programming chops to try to get a brute force answer to that question, so I'll leave it for somebody else to try that. If the 10-11-12 theory is right, the word in question is quite possibly "the," which is something to start with at least...